I have an apple macbook pro and I bought a USB 500gb hard drive to backup my data. because I only have a 200gb hdd on my macbook I also use the hard drive for storing some of the files on that i dont wish to keep on my laptop.

The only files that I want to back up from my mac are my music, images, work and video's which i have in seperate folders. What Im after is a better way to back up all my files rarther than having to copy and past them over to the hdd every now and again, a way to make it automatically sync the changes between the hard drive on my macbook and the USB one.

I know there is time machine, but I dont want to dedicate all my hard drive to just backing up time machine as I also use it for storing over flow files. I also dont want to back up my hole system, just the specified files.

Wow you sound exactly like me two weeks ago, right down to the drive size!

Time machine doesn't use up all your drive space and it stores the backup in a folder so the rest of the drive is usable. You can always repartition the external drive to separate the overflow files from the backup. I use time machine and it's already saved me once. I just wish it would work with filevault better.

Have you found time machine to be good, reliable and do what you want?

I have already partitioned my hard drive, 200gb (same size as my macbooks drive) for backus and then 300gb for my files. Im yet to set up time machine though as im not sure if it will do what im after.

Can you access the time machine backups in the finder just by browsing to the directory or is the only way to retrive your files to go flying through space with the time machines interface?

Reliable? Well it's saved me once and saved a me a whole load of time today. I exchanged my MacBook Pro for a new one(faulty latch), and all I had to do was restore my backup. I did this once when I screwed up OSX and it worked fine. This time, I restored my latest time machine backup and the MBP wouldn't boot. I tried the second latest backup(two minutes before the first one) and it worked fine.

I have a feeling the issue was caused by an incomplete/corrupted backup cos I pulled the firewire cable out halfway so I don't think it was time machine's fault.

Having said all of that, I have not heard of anybody else having these issues with time machine so I'm prepared to write it off as a one off issue. I still think time machine is great.

200gb may not be enough for time machine. I think the recommended minimum is 1.2-1.5x the original volume size(used space not the total formatted capacity), for the incremental backups.

I've been using Time Machine to keep a backup. It does a brilliant job of this. I don't have it back up everything, just mail, documents, photos etc. which take up about 50-60gb of my hard drive. I don't see the point in backing up the entire system so I specify which folders I'm going to have Time Machine back up and have set a partition on my external hard drive to 250gb (out of 750gb drive). Give me plenty of room to back up and have a number of different versions of files.